Proximity-based applications and services are a recent and enormous socio-technological trend. Proximity-based applications may be able to discover instances of applications running in devices that are within proximity of each other, and may then also exchange application-related data.
Current methods are limited given that all discovery related traffic and signaling as well as application related data exchanged may be routed through the network. This may negatively impact network performance and add unnecessary load. These current limitations may also impede creation of more advanced proximity-based applications.